Chairman’s message

“I firmly believe that PwC’s success requires each one of our 39,000 people to drive our vision. Getting everyone to understand what’s important to the firm – from our values and behaviors to our services and our approach to the marketplace – helps us serve our clients better. It also makes our people better at what they do. And developing better leaders is good for everyone.”

Bob Moritz, Chairman

The world is changing rapidly. Accelerating urbanization. Demographic shifts. Climate change and resource scarcity. Shifts in global economic power. Technological breakthroughs. Each of these alone will push business and industry to adapt. Taken together, they require our firm and our clients to be more resilient and more flexible in the ways we operate. Uncertainty is the new normal. While these megatrends may pose substantial challenges, they also present big opportunities for our firm and for the stakeholders we serve.

Our firm’s vision, however, has not changed. We are focused on making a difference for our clients, our people, the capital markets, and our communities by helping them unlock their potential and create lasting value. We push ourselves to set the standard in quality and lead the profession. We know being a responsible leader also provides us an opportunity to inspire our people through our actions, and we want them to be proud of the organization they chose to grow their careers. And we know the reputation we have built in the marketplace allows us to sustainably grow our firm, hire the very best people, and invest for tomorrow.

This past year was a strong one for our business as well as for our efforts around Corporate Responsibility. For example, in FY13 we increased the number of volunteer hours our people are giving in our communities by 90%. Many of these volunteer hours were in support of Earn Your Future (EYF), our five-year commitment to improve financial literacy among young people and financial training for educators. In our first full year of this effort, our people generously gave of their time and skills, delivering close to 150,000 hours.

We’ve worked hard in FY13 to establish an infrastructure and the relationships needed to succeed in our EYF efforts long term, and are looking forward to building upon those foundations in FY14 and beyond. Our FY13 efforts were solid and I couldn’t be more proud of our partners and staff for the impact they have made in our communities. The feedback from the students and educators has been tremendous.

Our pro bono efforts continued to gain steam this past year, having exceeded our $10 million stated goal by nearly 40% and delivering nearly $2.3 million to organizations focused on youth education. In FY14, we are looking to find ways to increase the scale of our engagement so even more of our people can participate.

We’re also making progress in managing our carbon footprint. This year, we met our FY16 30% absolute carbon footprint reduction goal with increased efforts on the part of our people and through the use of renewable energy certificates. Our next challenge is to continue building on our achievement as we seek to grow our business.

In the broader marketplace, FY13 saw the launch of our Investor Resource Institute, aimed at providing insights and perspectives on the capital markets. We are also seeing increased dialogue between our firm, our peer firms, and regulators on matters such as audit quality.

Whether it’s EYF or delivering our expertise to the companies we serve, our people are at the heart of our strategy. We want to maintain a culture that attracts the top talent by providing them with the coaching and real-time feedback necessary to grow their careers, an inclusive and caring environment that supports their ambitions, and the flexibility and options they want at every stage of their lives and careers.

As a result of our commitment to our people, our internal people engagement survey score in FY13 was the highest since we began tracking the engagement index in 2006. We’re doing well and improving, but we have a lot more work to do, especially around flexibility.

I firmly believe that PwC’s success requires each one of our 39,000 people to drive our vision. Getting everyone to understand what’s important to the firm – from our values and behaviors to our services and our approach to the marketplace – helps us serve our clients better. It also makes our people better at what they do. And developing better leaders is good for everyone.

I encourage you to read about these efforts and much more about Corporate Responsibility at PwC in the pages of this online report. I believe one of the most important attributes of a leader is the ability to listen. I welcome your feedback on how we could do even better.